(Formerly "Service Level Automation in the Datacenter")Cloud Computing and Utility Computing for the Enterprise and the Individual.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Google/IBM and "Yahooptel": The Race for the Souls of our Youth

Interesting developments this week as HP, Intel and Yahoo (annointed the title "Yahooptel" by Allistair Croll--see GigaOm post linked later) announce a collaboration to build a cloud targeted at academic and research organizations. Defined, perhaps, as a grid service cloud, the offering is well documented by the aforementioned GigaOm post, William Vambenepe, and the world, so I won't go into too much detail here.

However, I do think there is an interesting little trend here, noted by Stacy in her GigaOm post. Google and IBM, along with Yahooptel are pushing into academic circles for--at least in part--a very interesting reason: to allow computer science and IT Management students to gain experience building applications in so-called Internet scale architectures. The battle for young minds has begun, and the big dogs have a huge advantage here.

Now, there is an interesting counter force at work that will temper any chance of "total domination" by the large established players; the most successful cloud computing is based, at least in part, on open source. So the architectures that tomorrow's SaaS superstars deploy may be heavily influenced by a large vendor, but the frameworks, languages, interfaces, protocols and perhaps even services will be freely available from an open source project and/or vendor.

This is the beauty of open source in the cloud, at least for software. It firmly removes any great advantage to being an established player in the preceding market. The code it takes to build the next generation architecture becomes free and accessible, meaning anyone can get their hands on it.

Hardware, on the other hand, is still expensive to assemble in large configurations. I think this is the real driver for these academic clouds--not necessarily to lock in proprietary software approaches for cloud computing, but certainly to sell a hardware platform. Isn't that half the battle for a high-scale system developer's soul?

About Me

James Urquhart is a widely experienced enterprise software field technologist. James started his career programming a manufacturing job tracking system on the Macintosh (circa 1991), and slowly expanded his experience to include distributed systems architectures, online community and identity systems, and most recently utility computing and cloud computing architectures. He has held positions in pre and post sales services, software engineering, product marketing, and program management for the online developer communities of one of the largest developer sites in the world. His admittedly schizophrenic background is driven by a desire to work with technologies that are disruptive, but that simplify computing overall.

James is also an avid blogger. His primary blog, recently renamed "The Wisdom of Clouds" (http://blog.jamesurquhart.com), is focused on utility computing, cloud computing and their effect in enteprises and individuals.

In addition to his online work, James is the father of two children: a son, Owen; and a daughter, Emery; and the husband of the perfect friend and wife, Mia. James lives in Alameda, CA, plays rock and bluegrass guitar.